Web Comic: PaperXI is a mind bomb


 

Paperxi (paper 11) is an OLD web comic created by Dan Kim (@clone.manga on Twitter)
This 2003-2005 webcomic is a completed series and a nightmare to interpret, though well worth any speculation.

Premise:

14-year-old Maya survives a terrible train accident only to find herself in a strange world where people, places, and souls are made of paper. Now, hunted and alone, she has 11 days to find the bodies, reconstruct the accident, and return home.

This blew my mind a bit.. it is basically impossible to talk about.. this was a beast unto itself.. I do not know that the premise is a fair description. Maya survives, but nowhere in the plot is there any indication that ‘souls are made of paper’ or that Maya needs to find bodies.. does she find some? Absolutely, but i would be hardpressed to say it was on purpose.

The comic is primarily in black and white, with some red added in later frames. The contrast is so harsh that on some pages, you question what you are even looking at or if the image is damaged. Some nudity, lots of tropes, but ultimately one of the most original comics i have run across.

- go read online or download a zip of the entire experimental horror / horror comic

https://manga.clone-army.org/viewer.php?series=pxi

Spoiler below- read the comic before reading below.. meta mind bomb
—
So the description of the comic is incredibly misleading.. it infers that there is cohesion and a thread you can pull to keep you moving. There is no cohesion.

What I gathered from my reading and some ancient forum thread preserved on archive.org from 2006..

Where we land is that there are eleven pages in a book that have been mangled and overwritten. Maya is the Big Bad Wolf from Little Red Ridinghood and a white haired woman is dissatisfied, rewriying the ending. The train wreck is the embodiment of Maya/wolf’s ending being torn apart and put back together, with only glimpses of the bloody horror she consumes in reality (3 bloody heads in a bag, buried in the train wreckage)

Read the three posts by Inverse Falcon as they seem to really dial it in..

http://web.archive.org/web/20070409090058/boards.clone-army.org/index.php?topic=407.msg27478#msg27478









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